The Artist and the City

For thirty years, when she wasn’t writing books or winning genius grants, Sandra Cisneros has been pushing and prodding San Antonio to become a more sophisticated (and more Mexican) city. Now she’s leaving town. did she succeed?

by Jake Silverstein

February 2013

This winter, I met Sandra Cisneros for lunch at Liberty Bar, the new Liberty Bar, which moved in 2010 to the King William District after 25 years in a ramshackle building near the Pearl Brewery. The new Liberty has yet to acquire the ambience of the old one, which made it an appropriate setting for a conversation about, among other things, how San Antonio has changed since Cisneros first moved here, in 1984. Back then she had just published The House on Mango Street, a book that would fundamentally alter the course of American fiction by knocking down doors for Latino writers. A Chicago native, she moved to the city for a job as the literature director of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, a job that, for various reasons, would not hold her for long. The city itself was a different story. Though she has had a sometimes contentious relationship with the place, it has been her home ever since. During that time Cisneros won a MacArthur Fellowship (or “genius grant”), founded the internationally renowned Macondo Writing Workshop, and emerged as perhaps the most significant Chicano writer in the country. This month, after nearly thirty years, she is leaving San Antonio. 

I arrived early and sat waiting for her, listening as the hum of English and Spanish grew louder in the dining room. She arrived wearing a blousy white dress with Mexican embroidery and carrying a small briefcase, looking remarkably fresh after a twenty-city, months-long tour to promote her newest book, Have You Seen Marie? On the way across the room, she stopped to talk to state representative Mike Villarreal, who was having lunch with a local blogger. At a table near ours, a young Latina in business attire chatted with an older Anglo man. From time to time she eyed Cisneros. 

“I had no idea what San Antonio was about when I came here,” Cisneros told me, after I’d asked her about her early days in the city. “I knew it took two days to drive across Texas and there were bugs on the windshield and it was hot. The first place they took me was the Alamo. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it. So I touched it. Later on when I brought my brother to the Alamo, he took out his charge card and said, ‘You’re supposed to charge the Alamo.’ ” 

Cisneros has a disarmingly high voice and an extremely intent manner, even when ordering food. She opens her eyes wide and looks directly at whoever is talking to her, her face a mix of innocence and seriousness. She is likably hyperbolic. In 1984, she said, she was the only human being in San Antonio riding a bike. “I would wear a headset, and I would listen to Cyndi Lauper singing ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun,’ and I would cry as I was riding to work at the Guadalupe,” she said. It was a hard job. 

“What were you trying to accomplish there?” I asked. 

“I had a dream to create an alternative to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I had gone to graduate school. [Poet] Gary Soto was my first publisher, and we would always have this fight. He thought there was a lot of bad Chicano writing, and I would say, ‘I don’t think it’s bad, I think it’s unfinished. We don’t have a place where people can critique each other.’ And I had an idea that I could do that at the Guadalupe, but it didn’t turn out that way.” 

“Why not?”

“I was at a stage in my life where if you said don’t do something, then that’s what I was going to do. A lot of people saw me as the enemy or the usurper, which I can understand because Tejanos have a history of everything that they’ve fought for being taken away. So there was this xenophobia of my coming in from outside. San Antonio is a tribal town. The first question anyone asks you here is ‘What high school did you go to?’ I’ve never lived anywhere where people ask you that. It means that they’re trying to figure out where you’re from economically. I lived in a little garage apartment in King William, and people would say, ‘Oh, she doesn’t deserve to be director of the Guadalupe if she doesn’t live on the West Side.’ Well, I grew up on the West Side, my West Side, in Chicago. People who have lived in a neighborhood like that don’t want to go back. Except maybe Henry Cisneros.” (The former mayor is no relation.)

Our food arrived and she thanked the waiter warmly. As we ate, I mentioned that I had spoken the previous day to Franco Mondini-Ruiz, an artist and close friend of hers, who had suggested that the group Cisneros fit into most easily was the gay community, a process he’d described as “the queen bee finding her drones.” 

“Oh, yes,” she laughed. “The people who welcomed me in were the gays. Especially the Latino gays. They took me in because they were like me—we both embraced our Latino roots but we had to revise that heritage because otherwise it would kill us. So we were very in love with an invented Mexico. We couldn’t embrace it as it exists without some revision for our own survival. Did you ever see the movie Paris Is Burning?”

“The one about drag queens?”

“That was a very relevant film. There were ‘houses’ in that movie: the House of Chanel, the House of Whatever. In San Antonio you have houses too. I belong to the House of Guadalupe. Tienda Guadalupe was a little Mexican folk art store run by Danny Lopez Lozano that became a literary and artistic salon for a lot of the bohemios, the hipsters. Danny was a Tejano gay man who, like all of us, was enamored of an invented Mexico. He was our mother. Before all of us met each other and riffed off each other there was Danny. He doesn’t get enough credit. He revitalized traditions like Day of the Dead, which now has become such a pura pachanga.” 

Before she could continue, the young Latina from the nearby table approached us. “I’m so sorry to interrupt you,” she said, “but Ms. Cisneros, I just wanted to tell you how much I admire you.”

“Oh!” Cisneros beamed. “Well, make sure you tell him,” she said, gesturing to me. “He’s a journalist.” The woman smiled at me politely. “You did something for my parents,” she continued. “My family had a tortilla factory in Market Square. We had the gorditas. And you wrote the most beautiful article about us in the New York Times. We have it framed. And you know, I read that recent Current article about you, and it made me so upset. So I wanted to say thank you. It would be a shame if San Antonio lost you.” 

The woman left, and Cisneros sat quietly for a moment, visibly moved by the encounter. I offered that this must happen a lot.

“In private,” she said. “But in public I feel underappreciated.”

The San Antonio Current story that the woman had referenced had been published in early 2012 at the end of a wave of Sandra-leaving-San Antonio stories. (For the record, she says that she is moving to Mexico and that she will keep her house, visit regularly, and return to San Antonio in one year, though it seems possible that she’ll move on after that.) News of her departure, which had first broken in November 2011, was initially greeted with lamentation. “Why does it feel like we just lost the Spurs?” a columnist for the Express-News bewailed. The Current countered with a gossipy story that challenged Cisneros’ status as a beloved local treasure by dragging forth two disgruntled former friends to air their complaints. The alternative weekly’s cover showed Cisneros under the line “So Long, La Sandra.” That was about the nicest part of it. 

That Cisneros has made enemies was not news to her. “I offended a lot of people here,” she said, “but it was never intentional. Some of it is my way of talking. My mom’s family is from outside Guanajuato, and they were gente campesina. We’re very direct, very working-class. I had to learn how to be polite as an adult when I realized I was offending people.” Nonetheless, the Current story seemed to be emblematic of a kind of local meanness that clearly pained her. She called it “getting a pie in your face every time you go out.”

“Let’s return to the late eighties and early nineties, as this community of artists was coming together,” I suggested. “What was it like?”

“It was magical. We felt like the whole world should be jealous of us. There was no need to go to Venice. You’d just go to Liberty Bar. Man, that was happiness. Every day was like live theater; you never knew what was going to happen. I used to tell people, ‘Liberty: it’s not just the name of the bar.’ Fun and fury and fights and creativity and the most intelligent humor. It was brilliant. People would come from out of town and say, ‘Wow!’ ”

“What about San Antonio today, twenty-five years later?”

“What happened is a lot of people with money moved here. And people with money are intolerant. So in King William, we’ve started to lose something beautiful.” 

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